


What The Scientific Process Has Wrought

by afteriwake



Series: In So Few Words [36]
Category: Bleach
Genre: F/M, One-Sided Attraction, POV Unohana Retsu, Science Terminology, Unohana Is Intrigued, Unohana's Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-16
Updated: 2012-07-16
Packaged: 2017-11-10 01:36:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/460789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afteriwake/pseuds/afteriwake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she thought about how she felt about him in scientific terms, she was ready to move away from the observation stage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What The Scientific Process Has Wrought

She had always been an open person. Warm and welcoming. That was just what her personality was, and always had been, and probably always would have been, had it not been for the actions of Aizen. Betrayal on that level hurt hard. She had always considered herself to be a good judge of character, and to misjudge someone so badly shook her to the core, made her reconsider who she really was. So outside of her duties she withdrew. She could put on the facade when needed, usually for the benefit of patients, and her friends who would get overly concerned, but it was not her true self anymore. With others she would remain aloof and closed off.

Except with _him_. Her interactions with him were always lively, and he was the only person with whom she would exchange actual threats. Threats veiled behind a calm tone of voice and a narrowing of the eyes, and couched in language that only gave the barest hint of a threat, but they were threats nonetheless. And she knew that he knew she would carry them out, too. He may be a brilliant scientist, and have come up with many ways to escape death, but she knew the human body just as well, and would come up with something deadly enough to deter him.

It got to the point that her dealings with him began to…excite her. She started to almost look forward to her visits with the twelfth division captain, because then she felt alive. She never acted like a glacier, the way that Byakuya did, but she felt it inside, and he would melt it a bit. He would get her blood pumping, get her heated, get her to feel something other than nothing. Get her to go with her day maybe not with a bounce in her step but at least with a purpose of some sort other than crawling back into bed to be alone with her thoughts. When it felt like the act of being the old her would overwhelm her she would get summoned to him and then she’d feel alive again.

She began to suspect he noticed. Perhaps he thought of her as some sort of experiment, though she doubted he had much interest in psychology. So she decided to turn the tables, study him for a change. Try to figure out what made him tick. Soon it got to the point where she wasn’t existing merely to pass her days; she was doing something, something that interested her, the first thing to interest her since her sense of self had been shaken to the core. By the time it came to fight Aizen, to go to Hueco Mundo and to defend Karakura Town, she was no longer acting like her old self, she _was_ her old self again, only more interested in a particular captain than before.

When they got back (because she knew Mayuri was smart enough to survive in Hueco Mundo) she would talk to him, not as Captain Unohana to Captain Kurotsuchi, but as a woman who was interested in him as a man, a woman who had found something interesting and wanted to move past the observation stage of the experiment into the clinical trials. Perhaps if she put it to him I terms like that he would understand what exactly he had done for her, that by simply being him she had gone back to being herself, and that somehow, in some way, he had restored her faith in herself and her trust in her own judgment, and for that she was thankful.


End file.
